Brief History of Mobile Apps: In the Beginning, There was Snake

Just as all living things, technology evolves. It changes and upgrades to better suit our needs, and the development of mobile apps is one of the turning points.

There are numerous sources that cite a different origin for mobile apps (some dating back to the 19th century). We’ll stick with the most interesting theory – the Snake game for Nokia phones.

If you are a `90s kid, then chances are you probably wasted a good amount of your time playing that game. It appeared in 1997 on the Nokia 6610, and it started out as few pixels moving around on the screen.

The next major mobile app development came a few years later – with the BlackBerry business phone in 2002. It offered a new and innovative concept of wireless email.

Then came the Psion EPOC (operating system). It began as a 16-bit operating system for Psion compatible devices, and later it licensed a 32-bit system to other manufacturers. It had options such as spreadsheet, database and a diary. It also included an option to add more apps using software packs.

Psion’s EPOC later evolved into Symbian, an operating system that was a joint effort of Psion, Nokia, Motorola and Ericsson. It was all the rage back in 2009, and an estimated 250 million devices were using the Symbian OS.

Today, mobile apps experience success like never before. Only on the Apple Store there are more than 20,000 new additions every month. The total number of downloaded apps is around 30 billion.

This boom in the mobile app development department increased the demand for developers. It is estimated that that number will grow up to 25 million by the year 2020.

The future for mobile apps is bright – we even predicted some of the trends that you can expect in the future.